VARIOUS ARTISTS "A Birth Place Is Not A Grave Site" C240 (No Part Of It)

This split/compilation/set took forfuckingever to write a review for because it’s a goddamn beast. The literal dozen of disparate artists, the behemoth content, the artwork (there’s an actual rose-stamped wax seal atop vintage wall paper AND a found polaroid included with every set, for fuck’s sake); all of it is polarizing and jagged and overstimulating and infectious in a mood-plague sort of way. It’s, it’s, it’s pretty fucking great, if you’re a masochist. Arvo Zylo does one hell of a job summing up the content on his own nopartofit.blogspot.com, so I’ll highly recommend reading that after (and maybe before) stumbling through my own impressions of this impressive culling of audio insanity.

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side a: 156
Thunderous clomping of horsehoof blends with an onslaught of canon explosions, the soft kiss of steel as it slithers, warm & bloodwet, back into its limbo/sheath. Condensation from battled breathing fogging the slotted brass helmet. All the crickets, as they lay in wait. If chainmail and visors had recurring knightmares, this is what they’d sound like; a condensed epic of cyclical forces, each destroying the other in asymbiotic fashion, until the hovering tractor beam takes hold. Quite a Jacob’s Ladder finale!

side b: NOVOSAK
In an alternate universe, Pauline Anna Strom’s “Trans-Millenial Consort” is a searing drone-opera about pissy electrons commuting to and fro betwixt an innumerable series of long-distance jobs that nail up their shutters at random. Novosak manages a tightrope balance between long tones rendered fairly smooth, lightning hot, and crushingly heavy. Pretty much uncoolable lava/feedback. Think of a possessed Eliane Radigue, with anger issues, and far less patience.

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side c: MORGAN GARRETT
Harsh wall vibes with gripping industrial/noise-rock aesthetics. Death gasp electric chair diva passages. Like if Daughters stayed up for a week straight on a hunger strike, then broke their silence to deliver an irritation-assault via dinosaur drum machines and a few dying sequencers.
Dynamic pop movement and release amidst a backdrop of psychotic breakdown.

side d: GNARLY SHEEN
As the name implies, this artist manages to appropriate some Gnarly hXc/punk recipes and metal/classical leads, and then slathers them with a greasy, noisy/ambient Sheen, thus suffocating them in the interest of hermetically sealing off the former trope, using its subsequent death and decay as fertilizer for better garden beds…for better zombies… to spring forth from, whenever some better occasion arises. In keeping with the themes of “ABPINAGS”, it stands to reason that, perhaps, a Grave Site COULD, indeed, be a Birth Place. “side d" is a great document showcasing the seduction of listening to treated acoustic instrumentation alongside subtle-yet-blown-out electronic textures.

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side e: LALEMUS
Look, we all know GeAr aren’t the only ones allowed to wax lyrical on what the earliest séances and ceremonies of other planets (and galaxies) might sound like. Lalemus, too, is an entrancingly intuitive conduit for conjuring up sets of bewildering visions:

side f: ARACHNAD
After sides a-e, f’s ARACHNAD begins by providing a relatively gentle Yield sign, a limbo, a purgatorial waiting room for us to process this first half, with notions of subtle toil, minimal brimstone-boil texture, and a stoic reminder of what’s always to come with any other No Part Of It release; more challenge, more pain, more gain. As one’d imagine, this recuperative rest station doth not last long…

Arachnad then switch it up, substituting their introductory, more mellow contribution, with outright catchy DUNE-dance numbers, bleeding in tortured drum machine lines and some simple synths to color in their hellscape of melodic, if not dismally melancholonic, arrays of misanthropic throbs & shimmies, giving a whole new meaning to the imperative “get down”.

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side g: BOYLE
Mysterious, meandering flute passages and spring-coil toilings laid o’ertop mildly massaged percussive field recording loops and ER fluorescent thrums (and their all-pervasive trebly hums)! This nervously blissful meditation plays out like a host of fevered daydreams from the infirmary at the foot of great mountains, where angsty water pipes hammer out their thermal distress upon the haunted convalescent below.

side h: MARK SHIPPY

Pulsating swarms of deep static-drone, tortured electric guitar treble-yelps, and one staggeringly nasty riff attacking and abating, exploring and imploding. Without a single percussive kiss, Mark Shippy turns the stoner riff on its sticky skull, replacing hedonistic might with unrelenting terror, all the while commanding our spines to systematically weave like slo-mo palms in a hurricane. it’s ugly. it’s heavy. it’s everything you’d expect from No Part of It, all without adherence to any formula. Is that the formula? no.

Slow, seamlessly blended descent into an all-alarms chaos that renders itself atmospheric, like that fucking meme with the dog sipping coffee in a room that’s on fire & looks around & says “this is fine”.

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side i: ILTH ZONGZ
Opening: unencumbered, loose syncopations of some possible typewriter battery & glitchy loop, but it’s ever Reichian evolution keeps it fresh, whilst low-hertz damned-souls-in-lamentation-in-slo-mo tremoloes siren, dead center, in the mix. Are these spirits being pummeled or are they summoning catastrophic comets to surround them like quirky quarks? By the denouement, a stoic celebration may have been achieved.

Volcanic contractions and their syncopated moans spook equestrian poltergeists into harried pacings of the caldera.

By the last slurp, no one is sure: are these repeated pleas “SOS" or “SO WHATs”?

side j: MOULTTRIGGER

The name of the game is “destruction”, the rules, lie. As in, denounce “fidelity”; as in, obfuscate. Moulttrigger K-N-O-W-S the beauty of a microphone’s limitations and takes painstaking steps to forge meditative riffage to showcase them. At times, it’s outright dancey; at others, catastrophic.

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side k: ANASTASIA VRONSKI

Anastasia Vronski’s contribution to this epic 12-sided collection snakes its way through static, seismic rumblings, ghostly world beats, and garage-burning blackmetal aeshetics, all while maintaining an undeniable, dissociated noise stock. These 20 minutes play like their own mixtape within the compilation with the unifying glue of manic darkness holding it all together.

side l: DJPTSD

So, of course, to round this whole shebang off, Arvo Zylo chose to close out this six-tape collection with some poignant, deeply hypnotic spoken word-centric industrial funk/noise. That’s right. and, it’s a hair-raising documentation of human corruption and mental/spiritual degradation that’ll haunt anyone willing to listen between the lines (and do a little homework on the subject matter being touched upon).

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I’ve probably listened to this entire compilation about 20 times through, and the implied constellations keep coming, with every listen. It feels kinda criminal that there are so few of these collections to go around, but I hope that somebody’ll maybe press it to 6xLP wax some day, when we move away from formula, in the interest of darker moods.

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